Sunday, July 20, 2014

Patience

This summer, we are making our way, week-by-week,
through Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, which he wrote around the year 58 or
so of the 1st century. It’s the longest and most studied of all
Saint Paul’s letters. My first extended personal encounter with it,
however, occurred some 40 years ago not from study but in a Peanuts cartoon. As I recall, Charlie
Brown was moaning and groaning in his characteristic way, until finally someone
said to him, “Stop sighing,” to which he responded, “It’s scriptural,” and then
proceeded to cite Saint Paul’s words from the short passage we just heard today
– in the more elegant, more traditional translation, for the Spirit helps us in our weakness, with sighs too deep for words.

Well, of course, there really is a lot to sigh
about. Just tune into to CNN, even in more ordinary weeks when commercial planes haven't been shot out of the air by terrorists. Indeed, the background for the 2 verses we just
heard could be called “the problem of the present,” that is, the tension
between, on the one hand, the obvious reality of the present time, the sense of overwhelming futility that seems to characterize the world, and, on the other,
our hope as children of God andjoint heirs with Christ. We have, Saint
Paul insists, been offered an alternative, already in the present - the revelation of the children of God, empowering
us to receive the word of the kingdom and so bear fruit (what Saint Paul calls the first fruits of the Spirit) by responding to its stirring call
to a total reorientation of our lives.

Even so, we remain burdened by what we have made of
ourselves and our world. Left on our own, we would stay stuck there. Prayer, Paul seems to be suggesting,
is our entrée to a different future – a future better and brighter than the
present but already accessible to us now, thanks only to the presence
and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us, filling us, surrounding us,
transforming us.

Similarly, the parables Jesus proposes in today’s
Gospel all illustrate the slow – but inexorable – progress of God’s
kingdom, transforming our pathetic present into God’s glorious
future. God sows his good seed in the field of the world and patiently
waits until the harvest before separating the wheat from the weeds. The weeds
are very real and must be recognized and dealt with eventually. But God’s judgment is patient
with the world – for our sake. Because, of course, God is not at all like us!
As we just heard in the book of Wisdom, God’s mastery over all thingsmakes
him lenient to all. He governs us with much lenience, thus giving us good ground for hope that he would permit our repentance.

God is not at all like us! In our frustratingly
futile present, we lack patience – with God, with ourselves, with one another, with our world.
But, again, God is not like us! Like the yeast
which, when mixed with flour, leavens
the whole batch, God is patiently
filling, surrounding, and transforming our world with the presence and power of
his Holy Spirit.

As the first
fruits of the Spirit, we – the Church, Christ’s witnesses in the world –
reflect the Holy Spirit’s leavening presence and power at work.We are not quite there yet, of course,
as the parable of the field so dramatically demonstrates. Wheat and weeds
coexist in the Church – as they do in each one of us individually.

With the presence and power of the Holy Spirit
acting upon us and within us, we are being aided to trust God’s process and
make good use of the opportunity his patience provides us.

Homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, St. Anne's Church, Walnut Creek, CA, July 20, 2014.

About Me

Rev. Ronald Franco, CSP, is a member of the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle (The Paulist Fathers) and Vice-Postulator for the Canonization Cause of Paulist Founder, Isaac Hecker. He is Pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish, Knoxville, TN,